The present invention relates generally to wireless receivers, and more particularly to interference suppression receivers.
Interference present in wireless communication signals impacts transmission power requirements, system capacity, data rates, etc. For example, lower interference levels enable data transmissions at lower transmission powers and/or at higher data rates. Thus, interference suppression represents an important element in wireless communications.
Multi-path dispersion represents one source of interference in Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, such as Wideband CDMA and IS-2000. With dispersion, multiple echoes of the transmitted signal(s) arrive at the receiver with different relative delays. These echoes cause interference between successive symbols and result in a loss of orthogonality between symbols sent on different, orthogonal codes. However, receivers may take advantage of correlations between multi-path signals to reduce interference from the received signals.
Wireless receivers may include an interference rejection equalizer (IRE) that takes advantage of the existing correlations to reduce multi-path interference, e.g., orthogonal interference due to own-cell interference and non-orthogonal interference due to other-cell interference. Generalized RAKE (GRAKE) receivers and Chip Equalizers (CE) represent two types of IREs. For example, GRAKE receivers include a bank of RAKE fingers, where each RAKE finger generates a despread sample stream with a particular finger delay. An interference rejection combiner (IRC) generates an output signal with reduced interference by combining the despread sample streams while applying the appropriate combining weights w. The IRE typically determines the combining weights such that Rw=g, where g represents a vector of channel coefficients for the multiple channel paths, and R represents a matrix of impairment correlations between the despread sample streams.
The IRE may estimate instantaneous impairment correlations R using a non-parametric approach, where the equalizer processes known pilot symbols embedded in the received signals to extract the impairment components. Based on the extracted impairment components, the receiver directly estimates the impairment correlations R. This type of approach typically requires a large number of pilot symbols. When the current measurement interval does not include a sufficient number of pilot symbols, the estimated impairment correlations R may be undesirably noisy. To remove at least some of the noise, the receiver may filter the estimated impairment correlations R. However, at high processing speeds, the resulting filtered impairment correlations represent more of a time average of the impairment correlations, instead of the desired instantaneous impairment correlations.
The IRE may alternatively estimate current impairment correlations R using a parametric approach. The parametric approach analytically constructs the impairment correlation matrix based on the available channel information. Because most of the multi-path interference comes from a limited number of well-defined sources, the parametric approach provides accurate impairment correlation estimates at both high and low processing speeds. However, the processing resources available to wireless devices may be insufficient for conventional parametric approaches.